Model for character in Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’

Until three years ago, Beatrice Kozera, who died this month at 92, did not know she played a role in American literature.

In 1947, she had an affair with a man she met on a Greyhound bus in Bakersfield, Calif. Hewas Jack Kerouac, whowould go on to write “On the Road,” a book that defined a generation rebelling against conformity. The Beat Generation would help fuel the social upheavals of the 1960s. She was the woman behind “Terry, the Mexican girl,” a character in the novel and a pivotal part of his career.

Without their encounter, “On the Road” might not have been published. The book was rejected for six years until the Paris Review published the excerpt “The Mexican Girl” in 1955. Kozera, known then as Bea Franco, is mentioned by name more than 20 times in Kerouac biographies. For decades, many researchers looked for her to no avail.

Writer Tim Hernandez found her with the help of his mother, Lydia, a former farmworker who lives in California’s Central Valley.

When he first knocked on the door of Kozera’s Fresno home in 2010, Kozera’s daughter, Patricia Leonard, told him he must have thewronghouse. “My mother is an old woman who has lived here all her life. She doesn’t know famous writers. She’s not of that world,” Hernandez said she told him.

He returned with copies of letters inKozera’s handwriting. Kozera said she couldn’t quite remember the name of her fling — John? Jack?— and that she knew nothing about a writer namedKerouac.

“But she had this glimmer in her eye. She was very coy about the whole thing,” Hernandez said.

When he handed her a photo of Kerouac, she turned her back to him and her family and said, “He’s good-looking, isn’t he?”

“On the Road” is associated with San Francisco and Greenwich Village in New York. It plays out against jazz clubs, poetry readings and drug use.

But for a few pages, Kerouac paints the Central Valley of the 1950s — “sullen Okies” reeling to the music of a cowboy band, an elderly black couple picking cotton, Mexican shantytowns and a young woman who fantasizes of moving to New York with a man not of her world.

“It’s the most heartrending part of the book. For the first time there are consequences,” said Gerald Nicosia, author of “Memory Babe, A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac.” “Until then, he’s just been traveling around getting high. It’s a lark. But she has family connections. ... If she doesn’twork in the cotton fields, her children starve.”

Hernandez said he sought outKozera not only because of her tie to Kerouac, but because of her own life.

“The Central Valley is very working class. People tend to think their stories aren’t worth telling,” he said. “But here’s a woman whose story opens a book that changed American culture.”

Beatrice Renteria was born in Los Angeles in 1920. Her family followed the crops fromLosAngeles to the San Joaquin Valley.

People commented on her beauty, especially her green eyes, described as blue byKerouac.

She married Albert Franco Sr. and was the mother of two by 23. After her husband abandoned the family, she left her children with their grandparents and waited tables andworked in the fields to send money home. She tried working in banquet halls in Chicago but was too small to lift the big platters.

She reunited the family in a housing project in Fresno, later moving to a house in a working-class neighborhood. She waited tables for years.

She also married LeRoy Kozera, who died in 2004. Well into her 80s, she continued to take bus trips. She said she liked to see the country and meet people.